Skin Game
by Alexia Eve
Summary: Dawn reflects after "Blood Ties," vignette-style.


Skin Game  
  
  
She stands naked in the bathroom.  
  
Her clothing is piled on the floor by the door, looking just the way it did when she stepped out of it an hour or so ago.  
  
She had been listening at the top of the stairs for a while, hearing her mother and sister arguing over something about which they seemed to agree completely, but she decided she'd had enough. There was no need to listen to pointless babbling about the best way to handle her.  
  
How do you handle something that isn't even real?  
  
She can touch it, she can feel it, but it isn't even there.  
  
She keeps staring at herself in the mirror, trying to locate a sign that she isn't real, but all that she sees is the same flesh she's always known. She wonders, for a moment, if she looks different somehow, if the other boys and girls have something that shows that they're different.  
  
When she was in seventh grade and they'd had the first time in the locker room, she'd looked around, trying not to look conspicuous around the other girls. Everyone had been doing the same thing; occasionally, they'd make guilty eye contact, and the noncommunication had been enough.  
  
There, surrounded by slightly developing bodies, she might have felt weird- felt too fat, or too thin, or too flat, or too curvy. But she never felt too different from all the other girls, never felt like they were part of one species and she was from another.  
  
Today she feels like she's from a whole different planet.  
  
She doesn't look directly at any part of herself. She takes in the whole, the shape. She's desensitized to her body, to the swells of flesh and the way that she sometimes seems all angles and other times, all rounded.  
  
Today she looks at the mirror and all she can see is caked blood.  
  
She wouldn't let Mom or Buffy bandage it. She wanted to feel it. She wanted to look down and see the blood caked over her arm. She wanted to look back at her shirt- her green shirt, one of her old favorites- and see the blood stains up and down her right sleeve.  
  
Seeing it lying there on the floor in that messy pile with the rest of her clothing, the bloodstains don't represent the fact that she's alive anymore. They represent death and destruction and chaos.  
  
The blood is gone now. It's not a part of her. People are flesh and blood and she isn't a person, she's a key. The flesh is broken. The blood is separate.  
  
She doesn't see herself as a person right now. She sees herself as a shell. It's a feeling that runs so deep that all the blood in the world could be drained and she still would feel it coursing through her veins. It's as visceral as possible, without her having real viscera.  
  
She tries to imagine herself fitting in somewhere. She imagines herself with Buffy's friends, laughing as though they're all one big group and that Anya and Willow and Xander and Tara and especially Buffy, all of them- they all treat her as an equal. She imagines herself with Janice and Lisa, and they were all cooler than Kirsty and her friends, obviously; they'd be laughing and she'd be flirting with Kevin, who would like her- no, he'd be her boyfriend.  
  
And all that she can see now is fitting herself into a lock.  
  
The monks gave the Slayer a key in the form of a sister. That's all she is. Buffy isn't her sister. Buffy is her watchdog. Buffy is the Sphinx and she is the Sun, just as transient and just as impossible to protect. Buffy can pretend to be her sister but she doesn't see her as a sister. She sees her as a key. That's all.  
  
She steps into the shower and turns on the water at full blast.  
  
She can feel it pounding against her skin. She hates her skin. She hates everything about herself.  
  
The water is scalding her back. No, it's not- it's not hot enough to seriously burn her. But it hurts.  
  
She needs that sometimes.  
  
Her hand is bleeding again and she's too preoccupied staring at the drip to do anything about stopping it. It barely hurts. It's beautiful.  
  
It's life.  
  
She pours some shampoo into her other hand with as much force as she can muster, and she slowly massages it into her scalp. She remembers bubble baths from when she was younger, bubble baths at their old house in LA where Mom would pour her into the tub and Buffy would whine about how long they took and why Mom never made HER bubble baths anymore but in the end, they'd both help wrap her in these gigantic soft fluffy towels and she'd giggle.  
  
She wonders if the monks made that memory to give her affection for her sister or to give Buffy affection for her.  
  
She wonders how her mother feels, having given birth first to a Slayer and then to someone who doesn't exist.  
  
It's like being a regular parent who gives birth to two deaf kids. They have something that will make taking care of them that much harder, that will make death that much sooner and more imminent.  
  
Being a Slayer isn't a defect, though. It's a bonus.  
  
Being a Key? That's just a detriment.  
  
She finishes rinsing her hair. The floor around her feet is clouded with suds. The soap is tinted pink from her hand.  
  
She'll rinse the shower floor later.  
  
She steps out and she stares at herself again. Her hair is limp and dead looking, hanging against her neck like armor. Her skin is red and splotchy, mostly from the hot water, but also from the tears. She looks like she has pinkeye, but she knows it's just from the crying. Distractedly, she wipes snot off of her face before it hits her lips. It smears against her skin, thick and yellow and ugly. She stares into her own eyes, trying to understand what's going on behind them.  
  
She never will, though.  
  
What's going on in her head can't be real.  
  
It can't be real unless she is. 


End file.
